Despite its flaws, Caldwell’s book does adequate justice to Mosley’s battle with a sadly inadequate justice system.
Law professor and novelist Caldwell (Red, White & Dead, 2009, etc.) recounts the moving story of 19-year-old African-American Jovan Mosley’s wrongful arrest and imprisonment.
On Aug. 6, 1999, the college-bound Mosley, who had previously worked as a law clerk, was in the wrong place at the wrong time in a rough Chicago neighborhood. There he witnessed the fatal beating of Howard “Bug” Thomas by local gang members, some of whom he knew personally. After discovering that Mosley was present at the crime scene, the local cops were determined to link him to Thomas’s death. Although Caldwell is no lapidary prose stylist, her recounting of Mosley’s forced confession and subsequent six-year imprisonment is powerful enough in its conveyance of the facts. The cops threw Mosley in an interrogation room and refused to let him leave until he signed a confession for the murder, after which he was escorted to his new home, “SuperMax,” the maximum-security division of Cook County Jail. Caldwell examines Mosley’s bleak prison life, detailing the inevitable conflicts with other inmates and the administrative negligence that kept him jailed without a proper hearing. Enter veteran criminal-defense lawyer Catharine O’Daniel, who met Mosley while visiting SuperMax, suspected something fishy about his case and decided to represent him pro bono. Soon, Caldwell was called upon to assist O’Daniel. As beneficial as this duo was to Mosley’s cause, their personalities nearly eclipse the stoic Mosley and his amazing perseverance. A surfeit of the author’s self-congratulatory biographical references, along with excessive water-cooler banter with O’Daniel, also hampers the narrative.
Despite its flaws, Caldwell’s book does adequate justice to Mosley’s battle with a sadly inadequate justice system.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0023-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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